One specific sociology trading card is making the rounds once more. It’s the type that’s tacked to a department corkboard, with the laminate scratched from years of being crammed into tote bags and the corners half-curled. It features Stuart Hall (sometimes printed as C.S. Hall on older runs), and cultural studies programs in Britain and the US have been requesting its reprinting for reasons that seem both clear-cut and somewhat enigmatic. Silently at first. Then in a quieter manner.
The card itself isn’t particularly elegant. A brief list of contributions, a date range, a brief biography, and a black-and-white portrait. However, if you ask any graduate student who attended a media studies seminar within the past 20 years, they will tell you that they have either seen it, owned it, or gotten into a heated argument with someone over coffee. The Hall card has been used in hundreds of classrooms, according to Theorycards.org.uk, which catalogs the prints. This is the kind of statistic that seems insignificant until you consider what it really means. Hundreds of rooms. Hundreds of exchanges. The face of one man was passed around like a relic.
It’s difficult to ignore that the resurgence of interest in the field he helped create is occurring at an odd time. Hall, a Jamaican-British theorist who never truly left England after arriving in Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship in 1951, spent his career arguing that culture was not as refined as the educated classes claimed. He claimed that culture was lived. fought over and interpreted. He transformed a University of Birmingham center into something that changed a generation’s perception of television, commercials, immigration discussions, pop music, and other commonplace, dubious, and magnificent aspects of daily life.
However, over time, many of his concepts have been reduced to seminar buzzwords. encoding. decoding. representation. Perhaps this is why the card has become such an odd object of affection: students recognize the language without always understanding where it came from. He is anchored by it. It gives the footnote a personality.
The same grievance, expressed subtly but consistently, comes up when you speak with a few professors. There is a feeling that cultural studies has strayed, and that something safer and more formal has taken the place of the Birmingham School’s initial messiness, which was its insistence on connecting theory to real political life. Returning the card, even if it’s just a little printed item that was distributed during the first week of the semester, seems like a way to say, “This is where it started, and it started with a person, not a methodology.”
The entire episode would have likely amused Hall himself. He had doubts about canonization. Even though his lectures filled auditoriums, he refused to be regarded as a guru. His 1983 Illinois series, which Duke later published, attracted young academics from all over because, as Hua Hsu wrote in The New Yorker, Hall was “a masterful orator” who could energize an audience around ideas that most academics still deemed beneath them.
One could argue that the reprint campaign is sentimental. Perhaps it is. However, the choice of object is also telling; a card is inexpensive to print, portable, and somewhat democratic. An expensive monograph’s opposite. It’s possible that Hall, the son of a middle-class Kingston family who once wrote that his upbringing in a colonial pigmentocracy had influenced every aspect of his life, valued the format more than the gesture.
It’s still unclear if the reprint occurs on a significant scale. A few small publishers have expressed interest. Petitions are being distributed by departments, which seems charming and perfectly consistent with the discipline. The underlying mood is more obvious. Despite all of its theoretical tools, cultural studies is still looking to its founder. Not the books, not the references. Only the face. The man. The card.
